0

Are you feeling like you’re ready to kick off the weekend, but could just use three more opinions on the biggest tech news stories of the week before you really get the party started? Well you came to the right place, because it’s time for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days.

I’d be amiss if I didn’t acknowledge that this episode is missing a big, huge, massive story. We taped this late Thursday afternoon, one day earlier than normal, so that Leena Rao and I could say our proper CrunchWeek goodbyes sayonara to Drew Olanoff, who is departing TechCrunch for the purple shores of Yahoo. The story that the National Security Agency has been cooperating with some of the web’s most significant Internet companies to mine personal user data — almost certainly the dominant news of the week — broke as we were in the studio.

We did, however, talk about the NSA secretly tapping into all the call data from the Verizon network, which was clearly just the tip of the iceberg of these revelations.